Top Book Blogs 10/2017

[The Millions] October Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)

We wouldn’t dream of abandoning our vast semi–annual Most Anticipated Book Previews, but we thought a monthly reminder would be helpful (and give us a chance to note titles we missed the first time around). Here’s what we’re looking out for this month. Find more October titles at(Oct 1, 2017)

[The Millions] Goodreads Celebrates Its Tenth Birthday

“We started with just the two of us, and now it’s the largest reading community in the world.” Publishers Weekly interviewed Goodreads founders Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri Chandler about the site they founded 10 years ago, which now boasts 65 million members. Check out our own Edan(Oct 1, 2017)

[The Millions] Hemingway’s First Short Story Unearthed

“The notebook was there, unharmed, tucked inside a Ziploc freezer bag, with ‘Sep. 8, 1909,’ written in black marker.” After Hurricane Irma passed over Key West, Florida, writer and historian Brewster Chamberlin confirmed the relic he had found in May was safe: a notebook(Oct 1, 2017)

[The Millions] Marcel Proust Paid for Positive Book Reviews

“The French writer Marcel Proust paid for glowing reviews of the first volume of his Remembrance of Things Past to be put into newspapers.” Letters by Proust, which will be auctioned off at Soethby’s in Paris next month, reveal he was willing to pay handsomely for flattering(Oct 2, 2017)

[Book Forum] PAPER TRAIL: Hugh Heffner’s Troubling Legacy

S.I. Newhouse Jr.—who once owned the Random House publishing company and later went on to buy The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and a number of other magazines—has died at eighty-nine. The Hollywood Reporter is already asking Lena Dunham if she plans to adapt Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, What(Oct 2, 2017)

S. I. Newhouse Jr.—who once owned the Random House publishing company and later went on to buy the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and a number of other magazines—has died at age eighty-nine. The Hollywood Reporter is already asking Lena Dunham if she plans to adapt Hillary Clinton’s new memoir,(Oct 2, 2017)

[Guardian Books Blog] Poem of the week: I Keep My Eyes on the Ground by Caroline Bird

[Guardian Books Blog] Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of themAre you on Instagram? Then you can be featured here by tagging your books-related posts with #GuardianBooksScroll down for our favourite literary linksRead more Tips, links and suggestions blogsWelcome to this week’s blog,(Oct 2, 2017)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: The biggest kleptocrat in the Trump administration

What about the other grifters?(Oct 2, 2017)

[The Millions] Write to the End

“This is worth repeating to yourself every day as you sit down at your keyboard: You must write to the end of the story. You must make progress toward that end today. A sentence, a paragraph, a chapter. You must push the story forward, forward, forward. Don’t stop until you get to the(Oct 2, 2017)

[The Millions] Spitting in the Face of Empire: The Millions Interviews Nisi Shawl

Nisi Shawl’s debut novel, Everfair, reveals a history that could have been—that should have been. Shawl, a prolific writer of speculative short stories, wrote a steampunk alternate history that could just as easily be used as a how-to guide for creating a modern utopia. The novel illustrates(Oct 2, 2017)

Out this week: Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan; Fresh Complaint by Jeffrey Eugenides; Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien; A Moonless, Starless Sky by Alexis Okeowo; An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon; Dunbar by Edward St. Aubyn; Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen(Oct 3, 2017)

CNN was impressed by Trump’s remarks in the wake of the Las Vegas mass shooting, with no fewer than three pundits calling the president’s words “pitch perfect.” At the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik was disturbed by a telling discordant note: Trump offering “warmest” condolences to the(Oct 3, 2017)

The National Book Critics Circle has announced its inaugural class of Emerging Critics, including our own Ismail Muhammad! Read his first piece for us, “Frank Ocean and the Black Male Body,” here. The post Emergent Criticism appeared first on The Millions. (Oct 3, 2017)

[Guardian Books Blog] A London flat and no job: Margaret Drabble shows the Golden age of student life

Jerusalem the Golden’s heroine Clara must balance the demands of family with the opportunities of education. But those dilemmas have grown tougher since 1967When Jerusalem the Golden came out in 1967, it was described in the Guardian as a “detailed observation of the graduate predicament …(Oct 3, 2017)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Republicans struggle to govern

There is no GOP establishment or base(Oct 3, 2017)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Trump’s Puerto Rico shakedown

Don’t let the vultures shock doctrine Puerto Rico(Oct 3, 2017)

[The Millions] An Ode to Reading on Public Transit

It started with The New Yorker. A few years ago, I learned that I could get a discount to the magazine since I was a student, so I subscribed and began tucking each week’s issue into my backpack, underneath my MacBook and a makeup bag. It was a small but crucial pivot; from my third birthday to(Oct 4, 2017)

[Guardian Books Blog] Top 10 human-animal relationships in literature

On World Animal Day, novelist Henrietta Rose-Innes looks at some of the best depictions of this ‘crucial human task’, by James Herriot, Karen Joy Fowler and othersUnderstanding how we engage with the creatures who share our planet seems to me a crucial human task in this dire portion of the(Oct 4, 2017)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Dark American truths from Las Vegas

If Newtown wasn’t enough, why would Las Vegas be enough?(Oct 4, 2017)

[The Millions] 2017 National Book Award Finalists Announced

It’s officially fall, so that means it’s officially book award season, and nothing marks its advent like naming the National Book Award finalists. Winners will be announced in New York City on November 15. The short list is headlined by Jesmyn Ward, whose Sing, Unburied, Sing appeared(Oct 4, 2017)

Special projects editor John Cook is leaving Gizmodo Media. According to a memo obtained by Business Insider, Cook decided to take a cue from other Gawker staff who took a break after the company’s court battle with Hulk Hogan. “I’ve watched with envy in recent months as various friends —(Oct 4, 2017)

Kaur’s verses on love, sex and race have made her the most revered – and reviled – of today’s ‘instapoets’. As a new collection The Sun and Her Flowers hits shelves, is the social media star a dark omen for poetry or a fresh voice in literature?Rupi Kaur achieved a rare feat for a modern(Oct 4, 2017)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Trump’s Puerto Rico trip

Is the debacle in Puerto Rico all Trump’s fault?(Oct 4, 2017)

[Book Forum] DAILY REVIEW: Once Upon a Time in Shaolin by Cyrus Bozorgmehr

In 2014, the Wu-Tang Clan shocked the music world by deciding to sell only one copy of their new album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. Wu-Tang would “tour” the physical album to select venues, and then sell it to the highest bidder. Most fans would never hear the album. This was the(Oct 4, 2017)

[The Millions] Pinup Plath

“Presenting female writers as sexualized and frivolous diminishes their intellectual credentials, tarnishes their work as slight, not to be taken seriously.” The cover of the U.K. edition of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, a new collection of unpublished correspondence by the late author, features(Oct 4, 2017)

The National Book Foundation has released its list of finalists for the 2017 National Book Award. Honorees include Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing; Masha Gessen’s The Future is History; David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon; and Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties.(Oct 5, 2017)

In October 2015, Hogarth Press from Crown Publishing launched the Hogarth Shakespeare project, an anticipated eight-part series in which best-selling authors retell a Shakespearean classic as a contemporary novel. Jeanette Winterson’s cover of The Winter’s Tale—A Gap of Time—was published(Oct 5, 2017)

The 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature and its 9m Swedish krona purse ($1,095,939.52) was awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro in a ceremony broadcast live online. The British author has written seven novels, most recently The Buried Giant, and in 1989 he won the prestigious Man Booker Prize for The Remains of(Oct 5, 2017)

Join us as we follow the live reactions to the British author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go being named the 2017 laureateNews: Kazuo Ishiguro wins the 2017 Nobel prize in literature 1.28pm BST Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki, lived in England for almost 30 years before he made his(Oct 5, 2017)

[The Millions] Who I Am Is Everyone: The Millions Interviews John Haskell

John Haskell’s fiction is like little else. Or is it non-fiction? Or is it just magic and not something to be too greatly dissected? In one collection and three novels, he explores the mind’s torsions in an uncommon, questioning manner within a first-person sense of orality, like being(Oct 5, 2017)